2012 been chaotic, intense and overloaded year. Every season it is
getting harder and more complicated to follow all the progressively
expanding intellectual music scene worldwide as the new genres and
talents tend to emerge quite rapidly. Inbox is always full of new
records which vary from industrial, experimental to ambient or noise.
The spectrum of brilliant and promising music is enormous and this fact
sometimes makes us dissociate a little bit from this peculiar madness.
It is a gloomy feeling when many musicians and record labels starts
competing with each other involuntarily. Anyway, there is not only the
shadows that shroud the situation. We agree that this commotion is a
reason high-quality production and innovative projects to be born, but
sometimes it is hard to discover them all and even more harder to listen
to them.
2012 was quite fruitful in terms of releases. There were even several
unexpected comebacks, reunions. The amount of music is huge and it is
sometimes very hard to immerse in every interesting album properly,
contemplate it, appreciate it. Moreover, for some records, one year is
simply not enough. However, here we put some of releases we managed to
enjoy properly. If you are a real music lover you know that even in 2022
you can find amazing record that was released in 2012 and wonder ‘Where
I’ve been in 2012? Why I haven’t found it earlier? Who was listening to
this masterwork at that time?”. Take a look at these noticeable records
and compare with your own music vision, discuss and share your thoughts
about the situation in music in 2012 with us.
Justinas MikulskisCut Hands – Black Mamba [Very Friendly]Andrea Parker Et Daz Quayle – Private Dreams And Public Nightmares [Aperture]Raime – Quarter Turns Over A Living Line [Blackest Ever Black]F.C. Judd – Electronics Without Tears [Public Information]Thought Broadcast – Emergency Stairway [Editions Mego]Iibiis Rooge – Hespherides [Weird Forest Records]Lee Gamble – Diversions 1994-1996 [Pan]Emptyset – Collapsed [Raster-Noton]
Radvile NakaiteDemdike Stare – Elemental [Modern Love]1991 – 1991 [Astro:Dynamics]Orcas – Orcas [Morr Music]mmpsuf – Retina [Not On Label (mmpsuf Self-released)]Kane Ikin – Sublunar [12k]Various – Eat The Dream: Gnawa Music From Essaouira [Sublime Frequencies]Loscil – Sketches From New Brighton [Kranky]Simon Scott – Below Sea Level [12k]
Paulius IleviciusAndy Stott – Luxury Problems [Modern Love]Konx-Om-Pax – Regional Surrealism [Planet Mu]The Caretaker – Patience (After Sebald) [History Always Favours The Winners]Actress – R.I.P [Honest Jon's Records]Belbury Poly – The Belbury Tales [Ghost Box]Laurel Halo – Quarantine [Hyperdub]Windy & Carl – We Will Always Be [Kranky]Trust – TRST [Arts & Crafts]
Music is endless and that is a fact (while there is no absolute vacuum
in our daily routine). We wanted to distinguish some of the original
records that were re-pressed in the 2012. Seems that some of the artists
solid works disobey the time and sometimes re-born with a bigger energy
than they were originally released. Now when music scene is full of
kaleidoscopic influences from different times, cultures and authorities
it is a really appropriate period for these records to shine and compete
with fresh experiments. Our honor goes to these talents music who are
still effective and invincible by time.Monoton – Monotonprodukt 07 30Y++ [Desire Records]Alvarius B. – Alvarius B. [Abduction]John Cage – Shock [EM Records]Porter Ricks – Biokinetics [Type]Etat Brut – Mutations Et Prothèses [Sub Rosa]Various – Traces One [Recollection RRM]
Our mix series and interviews
uncovered secret and unexpected parts of artists, attracted people from
all over the world. It was an invaluable, exciting and educational
experience for us to meet these talented and friendly personalities, to
find a way to work together, to create rich and significant content. We
wish to believe that it also was an inspirational charge for our readers
too. We invited almost every person by ourselves. We follow their
meaningful work closely everyday and want to share the memorable records
that were released in 2012 by the people and their projects who
contributed for our journal.Scanner – Colofon & Compendium 1991-1994 [Sub Rosa]Nick Edwards ‎– Plekzationz [Editions Mego]Lawrence English ‎– For/Not For John Cage [Line]High Wolf – Know Thyself [Sun Ark Records]Machinefabriek – Colour Tones [Fang Bomb]Merzbow / Lasse Marhaug – Mer Mar [Editions Mego]Kreng ‎– Works For Abattoir Fermé 2007 2011 [Miasmah]36 – Lithea [3six Recordings]Team Doyobi ‎– Digital Music Volume 1 [Skam]Pillowdiver ‎– Cassette Recordings [Analogpath]BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa – Góða Nótt [Editions Mego]HTRK / Tropic Of Cancer – Part Time Punks Radio Sessions [Ghostly International]Trepaneringsritualen ‎– Deathward, To The Womb [Release The Bats Records]Spacemen 3 / Sun Araw – That’s Just Fine / I’m Gonna Cross That River Of Jordan [The Great Pop Supplement]Steve Roden ‎– Berlin Fields [3LEAVES]Anduin ‎– Stolen Years [SMTG Limited]Astor – Alcor [Kye]ASC – Lost Sync Part 1 & Part 2 [Samurai Horo]
That was our team’s subjective view and sincere hints to 2012. Next year
we will continue our journey through music and art universe trying to
reveal new talents. We have set some goals for ourselves too as we will
try to increase our team and create richer content. Also, we have
already started to plan our mixes‘ schedule for the whole year 2013, we are going to expand out horizons by taking interviews
from the more variable persons starting from people working in NASA
laboratories and finishing with solid choreographers. Everything we do
is just a strong love to what we call art and what we want to experience
in this grimy world every day.
Our team wishes, that everyone will respect and support to each other
in the music industry, share social connections, opinions, management
knowledge and casual advices. We would like to thank especially to our
dear readers and supporters (without you we would probably find it hard
to exist), music friends, co-workers, colleagues and other friendly
blogs, webzines, magazines. Also we want to thank Margarita, who has
left our team, for all the great work she has done.
Let the 2013 bring us much more pleasing surprises and inspirations to aim passionately for our dreams.
All the best,
Secret Thirteen team

2012: Favorite 50 Albums of 2012

In 2012, we were inundated: new artists, new labels, new microgenres,
new ideas. A lot of these artists and labels were dropping releases so
quickly (some weekly, some monthly) we could barely comprehend what was
happening, let alone listen to them all, while journalists were
scrambling to find new names for what was going on (doomstep, vaporwave,
djent, hipster house, drill, etc.). It reached a point where there was
an almost instinctual tendency to bracket any one-click genre creation
as a temporary historical perversion: wait it out long enough, and the
movement will either die or lose its cultural currency. Add the
bottomless wealth of SoundCloud streams, Bandcamp uploads, DatPiff
mixtapes, and Mediafire links, as well as the slipstream methodology of
our most prolific reptilian artists, and it began to appear like music,
over time, has been and will become increasingly fragmented.
But to understand music as being fragmented is to assume that there
is something to be fragmented in the first place. Music for the past
century has been best understood on the levels of syncreticism,
hybridization, and bottom-up subacculturation. Rather than fragmenting,
the very conception of what music is, or what it can do, is simply
expanding, reconstituting, and reinvigorating which notes can be played
(Aaron Dilloway), which songs can be sampled (Daughn Gibson), which
symbols can be recontextualized (情報デスクVIRTUAL), which genres can be
reimagined (Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos), which
rhythms can be danced to (DJ Rashad/Traxman), which bodily noises can be
aestheticized (Scott Walker). It’s at once about adapting and
preserving, revising and recycling, progressing and regressing, evolving
and devolving. All of these artists on this list contribute not only to
an expansion of music’s identity and reach, but also an expansion of
taste, where the perceptual foregrounding by artists like Dean Blunt can
exist alongside the modernist narratives of Swans, where the
pitch-black beats of Raime can complement the ecstatic harmonies of
Grimes, where taste is reinforced by Frank Ocean but problematized by
INTERNET CLUB, where the conceptual cinema of Kendrick Lamar can offer
respite from the heretofore unimagined disgust of Scott Walker, where
the untreated voice can be heard as alien (Laurel Halo) and the treated
one as embodied (Holly Herndon, Farrah Abraham).
To defragment, then, would be to revert to classicism, to
essentialism, to tired notions of authenticity. It would also be
impossible. Humanism ain’t what it used to be, such that the default
position of the modern listener is decidedly posthuman,
favoring disunity, telepresence, and multiple perspectives: We don’t
pronounce artist names; we copy-paste into search boxes. We don’t recall
the past; we retrieve information. We don’t listen to notes; we
identify symbols. We don’t create genres; we recognize patterns. Sure,
it can be scary to see consensus drifting away, to watch values you once
held so close morph into something once again foreign, to witness how
quickly technology can be rendered obsolete by the faster dominating the
slower, to observe not only the degradation of the environment, but now
also the degradation of our collective imagination and memory. But what
opens up is the possibility of adopting emerging, fluid identities, of
inserting yourself in varied contexts politically or aesthetically. It’s
a process of potentially becoming and embodying both nothing in
particular and everything altogether, with the quaint idea that the next
breakthrough in consciousness/justice/whatever may very well just be
deceptively dormant, eager to find expression at just the right moment. –Mr P50. Mykki BlancoCosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss
[UNO NYC]

00:00

Immersed in a sea of dolphins, octopuses, and underwater aesthetics, 2012 got pretty wavvy, while Mykki Blanco’s Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss
mixtape employed the dank beats of post-corporeal producers like
Nightfeelings and Matrixxman to submerge our ears deeper into the abyss
with a distinctly gritty mutation. The Gobby-produced “Riot,” for
example, flaunted a particularly subaquatic production quality with its
filtered, low-end beat. Alternatively, on “YungRhymeAssassin,” Blanco
affirmed her fluid lyricism over a distinctly buoyant production by trap
darlings Flosstradamus, comprising the genre’s signature airy snares
and handclaps. In spite of its title, Cosmic Angel was far from
angelic; Blanco rhymed about sinful scenarios including promiscuous
sexual behaviour with DJs (“Fucking the DJ”), and her fierce tone,
notable on the Benmar-produced “Kingpinning (Ice Cold),” remained frozen
solid, bearing the entirety of the album. Moreover, Blanco’s hard
militant demeanor, exemplified by the gabber-infused track “Virginia
Beach” and visible in the video
for “Haze.Boogie.Life” (which featured Blanco brandishing a baseball
bat), clashed with a softer exterior of girlish attire, subverting any
princessly presuppositions. –Stefan Wharton

No city knows how to commodify its past into neatly packaged scenes
like London does. Or how to brood over something embedded in its
cultural guts. But to make the connection between jungle and goth as
Raime did is more curious than knowing. After plowing through Detroit
techno, bass, and jungle, the pair of DJs who call themselves Raime
found meaning at the bottom of the pile with 80s industrial and goth. Quarter Turns Over a Living Line
was a rich, textured debut, made by men in their 30s willing to bang
sheets of metal under bridges like oafish art students to get a
first-pressed field recording basis to their sound. Their label Blackest
Ever Black has pledged to resist the increasingly rarified and bland
cycles of dance music by encouraging DJs like Raime to use real drums
and cellos. But there is a reference less tribally pure than
goth/industrial, which goes unacknowledged in Raime’s debut: the dark
dinner party vibe of 90s Bristol trip-hop. Quarter Turns Over a Living Line
was a smog-tinted record for their own city, to stand in good company
with the urban synthesis of their gloomy DJ forebears. Although Raime
favored a more gritty perspective over the aerial view of laptop
composers, they still made a curiously urbane record: blacker in tone
than in spirit. –J Monk

It’s 1973. Halfway through the filming of The Wicker Man, a
freak incident with a combine harvester leaves composer Paul Giovanni
dead, forcing director Robin Hardy to look elsewhere for a soundtrack.
Hardy searches high and low for a replacement. Delia Derbyshire, electronic music pioneer extraordinaire, has just left the BBC to score horror films,
and a desperate Hardy engages her on a whim, when, out of nowhere, his
quixotic begging-letter to Fairport Convention bears fruit in the form
of an unlooked-for affirmative. What to do but allow them to work
together and see what emerges from this fecund, pagan cauldron? This,
obviously, is an alternate history, one that could have produced The Belbury Tales.
But content aside, alternate history itself is very much what the Ghost
Box label, and founder Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly project, is all about: a
hauntological retro-futurism that draws on Astley-esque pastoral and BBC Keynesianism. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffin produced photographs of the fairies at the bottom of their garden in Cottingley; similarly, The Belbury Tales is the unreliable quarter-plate record of the time that Jupp saw something nasty in the woodshed. –Rowan Savage

This year, among the more enigmatic corners of the internet, a
handful of artists took a late-2000s trend toward revitalizing the
written-off sounds of nascent commercial digital instrumentation to its
extreme. Visually identified by an esoteric take on early digital 3D
animation and loosely grouped as vaporwave, these musicians often
foregrounded the incidental, architectonic music of the boardroom,
airport, or plaza, demanding a confrontation with the musical
inheritance of global capitalism, about which the music had an eerily
ambivalent relationship. INTERNET CLUB’s VANISHING VISION stood out among those who would make miracles from muzak. On a conceptual level, as James Parker put it in his review, VANISHING VISION
was “a dramatic demonstration of the fact that the music/muzak
distinction has always been unstable at a time when it’s less stable
than ever before.” Its source material was, while never loose, vaguely
human, from the wonky and inscrutable mallet percussion of “Zones” to
the hyperactive R&B guitar in “Pacific” to the downright beautiful
depth of “Ever be Real.” But music built on reframing, altering, and
appropriating those pieces of the musical past — often to an acute
degree — appears to be a project that bears only limited fruits. If so, VANISHING VISION helped point the way out before INTERNET CLUB, along with other key practitioners of the genre, vanished themselves. –J Arthur Bloom

In his review of Converge’s eighth studio album, Birkut wrote, “All We Love We Leave Behind
entices kinetic release in every possible way.” Truer words have never
been written: the latest offering from the Salem punk innovators just
may have been their most explosive. With the marked absence of the
digital effects featured heavily in the band’s last several albums, the
hooks hit with twice as much force and none of the filters. With Jacob
Bannon’s feral shriek now doubly piercing, the already-intricate riffs
revealed even more complexity. Best of all, the aggression neither
relented nor slipped into the redundancy that’s an all-too-common
problem among their peers. The frenzied, almost drunken grindcore of
“Tender Abuse” seamlessly flowed into sludgier cuts like “Sadness Comes
Home” and “A Glacial Pace,” and on the title track, they sounded groovy.
Ultimately, All We Love We Leave Behind proved to be the kind
of record to throw caution to the wind, flip the bird, and take immense
risks in nearly every aspect of its construction. And that fearlessness
paid off: we’d be hard pressed to name many 2012 records more
exhilarating than this one. –zcamp

Familiar elements of exercise, recreation, gambling, and incarceration float in a pea-soup-green void on the cover of Arca’s Stretch 2.
These ordinary objects are obscured by a humorous yet unnerving gray
elastic leg that’s twisted, tweaked, and stretched in unnatural and
impossible directions. This is much like the music that played beyond
this fascinating and uneasy exterior of Arca’s second release of 2012.
The clean-cut, delectable textures and rhythms that Arca produced here
were — by themselves — masterful achievements of beat-oriented
electronic music, but it was the vocals that made Arca’s work infinitely
intriguing. Sure, they recalled the familiar elements of gangsta rap
and modern hip-hop that we all know and love, but they were so heavily
manipulated that the resulting inflections and phrasings became
something else altogether: not a voice, not a synthesizer, but a
horrifying, untameable monster. In fact, by the last two tracks, the
monster had retreated back to its dark, dank dwelling, and Arca’s
brilliant instrumental work slowly dragged us back down to Earth, where
things just didn’t sound as cool. –Kmmy Gbblr

44. Fiona AppleThe Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
[Epic]
Describing music as “emotional” is among the laziest and most
short-sighted critical tools. Although you can typically suss out which
emotions are being lauded, it suggests that certain emotions are more
genuine, more real than others. So prepare to call me a hack when I
admit I constantly reach for “emotional” when describing Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel.
Apple’s fourth album was charged with something, but what? It was sad,
but rarely depressing. It was angry, but rarely bitter. Even its moments
of deep uncertainty sounded bathed in a soothing tranquility. “Every single night’s a fight with my brain,”
she sang on the record’s opening, but she sounded full-throated and
celebratory. Yet even then, the record never approached the
time-honored, arguably cynical tradition of juxtaposing happy music with
sad lyrics. Sure, The Idler Wheel was an exquisite piece of
work, a show of masterfully economic songcraft that found Apple
succeeding as she took her most uncomfortable leaps. More importantly,
though, it was proof that she had reached a level where she can bypass
typical modes of expression via song, obliterating artifice for
something decidedly hers. –E. Nagurney

Looking back, I can’t help but think that any vote against the Killer
Mike/El-P ticket in the 2012 election was a wasted one. We need these
guys in charge, people. On the one hand, you had Mike on the mic, brain
and brawn, a trained, tried-and-true veteran with an intimidating (read:
confident and, yes, charming/disarming) Southern drawl that managed
unparalleled agility despite its gravity. On the other, we have El-P ‘s
production matching Mike’s unstoppable aggression with laser beams of
synth and pulverizing blasts of bass, pushing Mike’s triumphs of
tradition headfirst into the unforeseeable future of hip-hop, a
sentiment no more apparent than on the album’s title track. On R.A.P. Music,
it all came together into something more than just a great listen.
Mike’s record was downright inspiring: a rapper unafraid to show his
seams/weaknesses and capitalize on them to better himself, a guy who
could both spin a gripping (or hilarious) yarn when he wanted and, of
course, wax the freshest of politics (see: “Reagan”). This meant
crumpling the whole damn system like a ball of trash into the palm of
his hand. So then, America, the question becomes this: Do we get a redo,
or what? –Strauss

The Deep Web is a void, a cesspool. It is the vacuum in which truth
and reality is consumed and held captive — the truth of the real, of
humanity’s brutal essence. The Deep Web “others” us by casting an image
that we don’t want to accept. When the first thing you see is a
violently erect penis, you can only imagine what the music will sound
like. And it was abrasive, hyperreal, and strangely intimate. MC Ride’s
delivery was raw and hoarse, exhausted from the hard-fought battle. For
Death Grips, hell is other people, and the Deep Web connected those
people and then made them an entity. In comparison, Exmilitary and The Money Store were just small-scale battles, the first movement. No Love Deep Web introduced the war. The void was swallowing us up, and Death Grips were the keepers of the void. –DeForrest Brown Jr.

In his quest to sample the entire internet, Alex Gray has tossed releases out like they’re wearisome sandbags weighing him down. Each mixtape was thrown haphazardly overboard and reached us as a chewy mulch
of noise and relentlessly choppy rhythms. They all bore the sound of a
man eager to get rid of his past before diving headfirst into a new
project (DJ/PURPLE/IMAGE) — Gray is desperate, perhaps obsessed, with
avoiding stasis. Yet rather than sounding like carelessness, Gray
sculpted moments of arresting beauty from his dizzying array of samples.
What was so entrancing about Fukd In Tha Game was its
impenetrability — I doubt even Gray knew what was intentional and what
was merely the result of random knob-twiddling/cursor-jerking at 3 AM.
Thus, nothing sounded forced or contrived, yet Gray somehow staged a
fascinating musical journey. We were casually led through bizarre
experimentalism (“Smoke Rings”), chopped ‘n’ screwed R&B (“Party
Time”), and poignant refrains (“Dem Boyz”) as if it were no biggie. Of
course, there was no shortage of artists reappropriating the past,
but Gray fucked with nostalgia in such a unique, bizarre, and
precarious way that his creative stamp would be readily apparent on any
musical debris he decided to grace with his presence. –Gordon Bruce

My favorite quote of 2012: “Underground music, nigga. I don’t want to make it.” The lyric completely outlined the composition of Lil B’s White Flame
as a vessel of himself. Mariah Carey became a fine-tuned human-musical
instrument, and Lil B has become the perfect 21st-century artist. Mixing
satirical rap, self-deprecation, hyper-aesthetic marketing,
trans-lyrical personification, and digital-deep emotion brought White Flame to that level of “I’m so self-conscious about my art work I’ll make it exactly about that. Oh, and hide it in the cheesiest pseudo-spoof mixtape, but keep it completely nostalgic on a Based level. And now I’m talking as Lil B the BasedGod as C Monster. It must be all that BasedEnlightenment I’ve been experiencing while listening to White Flame
on random through three different media players.” Yet, it’s really hard
to describe Lil B without quoting him — err, his work. So here’s the
skinny: for TMT’s Chocolate Grinder section, I usually listen to a single track anywhere between five to [feels like a milli] times a day, but I can listen to White Flame on repeat forever. Thus, this stamp in the Lil B timeline, I feel, was his most important in 2012. “White Flame ain’t no joke.” –C Monster

Conceptually and musically, ahnnu’s pro habitat created its
own environment, one that depended heavily on preserving the habitats of
his decaying sound sources (vinyl crackle, tape hiss) alongside
orchestral crescendos, broken soul samples, and slurred jazz noises.
While many beatmakers seek to isolate the parts of sound that they wish
to use in order to repurpose it for their own music, ahnnu took a step
back, analyzed the way the multiple layers of a song or sample existed
together as a complete habitat, and boldly used all of it, suggesting an
unbroken flow of similarities spreading between genres, locations, and
time periods. The result was so smooth, so natural that it was
impossible to imagine the size of the spectrum of varying musical
habitats from which the source material was pulled. So, when “canopoli”
rang in and a sampled voice suggested that “the music should be barely
noticeable… and non-distracting,” it was like ahnnu was imagining a
future of sample-based music portrayed by a smooth, painted landscape,
rather than one assembled from puzzle pieces. –Top Heavy

From the very first moment of “Moving Activity,” I felt a chasm open
up within me, gut-wrenching, head-sinking, chest-thumping. In all
honesty, this hadn’t happened to me in six or seven years, back when I
first heard “Everyone Alive Wants Answers” from the album of the same
name by Colleen. As did that album, Mechanical Rain started from
perfectly configured initial conditions and spun inward, onward,
unfolding, it seemed, according to nothing less than absolute necessity.
It made me feel alone, but in a way less sentimental than plainly
truthful. It wasn’t exactly easy to listen to the desolate intricacies
of Ian Martin’s two synthesizers, but it was a lot harder to not listen.
I found the album demanded my attention without forcing my attention.
It lay me out supine and closed my eyes, yet it refused to let me fall
asleep. Call it “meditative” as long as you understand meditation as a
discipline of the attention, as the ability to follow the objects of
your mind without encouraging any of them to mislead you. Mechanical Rain
was un-ambient: it didn’t sink into the background but rather became
the background so that the background could become foreground. I
listened to this music not to look at rain as weather, but to see rain
as (strange, mechanical) rain. –Tim Terhaar

Kevin Parker has fully dispelled any lingering pretenses to the low-pass production filter de rigueur by so many of today’s psych revivalists. Lonerism’s
purchase on solitude, what with its superabundance of reverb and wealth
of manicured synth banks, owed more to Rick Wakeman sonic excess than
Erickson angularity. Still accessible but short of anthemic, Fridmann’s
maximalist hand on the stern suited Parker’s preference for texture over
linear progression. Lonerism presented a giddy mood of teenage
exceptionalism, that die-cast sense of me-apart-from-the-world. And
yes, it was one to be indulged in, whether it was shamelessly air
drumming to the flanged fills à la Steven Drozd or giving a quarter
crank to the volume knob as “Music to Walk Home By” recapitulated its
forward momentum. Maybe Tame Impala’s abiding anachronism lied beyond
their retinue of driving pentatonic riffs, boutique fuzz pedals, and
Beatles-esque psych ramblings; Parker’s latest embrace of studio wonkery
and overdub indulgence hinted at an ideal of bedroom isolation
predating our impulsive connectivity. In those moments, when we were
caught chewing on the crumminess of the world, there were worlds to be
lost in — not networks or directories. Lonerism is one to pull from the stacks 15 years down the line after pulling your dad’s speakers out of the basement. –Ben Sullivan

“Evolved,” “changed,” or even “softened” might be words you had heard/read regarding The Men’s Open Your Heart,
but their MO is the band’s driving force, and that for all intents and
purposes was what had truly improved. Beyond their sound, quotable
approach, and penchant for direct riff-rippage (Stiff Little Fingers,
The Buzzcocks, and Sonic Youth, most notably), Open Your Heart
showed a band in a classic state of personal and professional growth,
while also showing that rock ‘n’ roll’s traditionalism could be just as
exciting and sincere as the bands and moods they had appropriated. From
the addition of slide guitars and an acoustic ballad, The Men looked to
rock’s past in order to find an outward reflection of themselves and
their intentions. Open Your Heart was not about reinvention,
revivalism, or bringing back punk to the masses. It was about how
playing with repetition, the past, and the present shapes meaning. The
Men aren’t saviors; punk rock can save itself. Or as they put it: “We’ve
never been a band that was part of anything.” Indeed, Open Your Heart was about something bigger than rock ‘n’ roll’s life status. –Alex R. Wilson

35. BurialKindred [EP]
[Hyperdub]
Burial likes to shroud himself in secrecy, the better to spin those
threads that comprise his all-consuming worlds of sound, those little
miracles that conjure up your most dangerous, most secret emotions. Such
was the dark magic of February’s Kindred EP. Deeper and more textured than any Burial release before, Kindred
not only captured the essential isolation and beauty of city life, but
also made you want to wallow in it. Second track “Loner” immersed the
listener in a soundscape where hope was twinned with despair, and once
its seven and a half minutes were over, you were genuinely surprised to
look out the window and see sunshine and palm trees rather than rain
streaming down the windows of a junker car parked beneath a bridge near
the docks. Critics drooled over the fact that tracks like “Ashtray Wasp”
and opener “Kindred” came closer to dance-floor staples than any Burial
release before, and why not? It’s only natural that, after Burial
guided you into the heart of darkness and out again into the light,
you’d wanna throw your hands up and celebrate the sensorial wonders of
the human experience. –Liz Louche

Rather than putting his energy into coming up with a new genre or
pushing some crazy personality to generate hype, John Dwyer unashamedly
focuses his Thee Oh Sees project on 1960s garage psychedelia. Although
perhaps not adding much to the critic repertoire of genre prefix and
suffix shuffling, what he and his collaborators presented with Putrifiers II
was a shining example of how to channel the raw garage power of The
Monks, The Sonics, and the experimental composition of The Velvet
Underground while maintaining that glint of newness, of a clear and
present danger that made garage rock so compelling to youth and scary
for adults the first time around. This album was not a mere
anachronistic exercise. Bolstered by a renowned ability to perform live, Putrifiers II
had a sense of immediacy to it that could not be faked with all the Pro
Tools tweaks in the world. Awash in distorted guitar lines and heavily
processed vocals, the pure jams of “Lupine Dominus” and the opening
track “Wax Face” could make believers of anyone willing to listen. Sure,
its forms may have been familiar — parallels could be drawn from “So
Nice” to VU’s “Venus in Furs” or “Wicked Park” to Syd Barrett — but the
energy that fuels Thee Oh Sees burned as hot upon their 2012 release as
it ever could have. –Alan Ranta

33. Farrah AbrahamMy Teenage Dream Ended
[Farrah Abraham/MTV Press]
Hoping to spark a critical debate on what exactly makes a piece of
art good, former director of the Tate Modern Will Gompertz recently wrote an editorial
making a plea for a major museum to stage an exhibition of works from
its collection that it deems to be bad art. Just let them try to acquire
Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended on behalf of The Museum of Bad Art; Abraham’s disorienting album fearlessly confounded every playlist and exhibition into which it was dropped, even as debate among critics
continued and The Museum of Outsider Art came knocking. There was so
much here: tortured echoes of tabloid sound-bytes, reality TV
confessionals, and pop’s faked climaxes, but as Abraham said, “I can
only put so much in a song.” For us, it wasn’t how much she had put in,
but how deep she had buried it — all of it ratcheted by Auto-Tune
and ribboned by churning bass riffs, both dramatizing and plowing under
the album’s tortured backstory. The year’s most compelling narrative,
sonically and otherwise. –Ian Latta

32. Motion Sickness of Time TravelMotion Sickness of Time Travel
[Spectrum Spools]

00:00

By design, free-form drone music usually doesn’t come packaged as a
big statement. It’s usually doled out little by little on CD-Rs,
cassette tapes, and 7-inches. This kind of experimentalism seems meant
to be absorbed in small bites, each one a beta test of a still-evolving
sound. Although her sound is still developing, Rachel Evans achieved
something of a watershed moment with this record. As she mentioned
during an interview
from May, the album’s gestation period saw it develop into a
surprisingly self-sufficient statement. It is self-titled, it’s a double
LP, and, as she told Jonathan Dean, ” I felt like the finished product
was a good representation of where I’m at right now with [Motion
Sickness of Time Travel]. In that way it is a definitive statement…” In
terms of pure aesthetics, the album was a blanket of bliss. Evans had
the courage and patience to allow moods and moments to develop at a
glacial pace, clearly feeling the freedom to stretch out over nearly 90
minutes of recorded material. She also had the compositional ear to
create beguiling layers of twinkling arpeggios and shimmering
oscillations. These served as ripples within the vast waters of her
sound, until the listener felt totally enveloped beneath the waves. What
remained was a picture of an artist totally in love with her
synthesizers, totally in love with the process of methodically building
her tracks, and totally in love with drone. –John Crowell

31. Jason LescalleetSongs About Nothing
[Erstwhile]
Cynically designed and morosely brimming over with sooty diamond-crusty apathy, Jason Lescalleet’s Songs About Nothing
nonetheless thrilled and enticed as one of 2012’s most euphorically
ear-opening experimental works. The mastery of a suspenseful atmosphere
drove each of its 13 environ-peeping sections before it dropped you
square in a glorping body-high bog of eternal squenche. In addition to
it being the masterpiece of queasy abstract voyeurism that it is, there
was a radiance-imbuing quality to this album. It was like a ratty old
blanket you pull over yourself and dream roving desert dreams of a
reckless peace and an ever-changing light at the bottom. You sense it’s
there, but you are too terrified to look and take stock. Such was the
way of it here. Songs About Nothing was the best horror film of
the year, for years. It was a well-curated museum of breaking down, a
murky stand of mottled black windsocks whipping about between two
receivers. The sample circled arguing with the microscope. Time squeezed
tight and flexed. –Willcoma

Abandoning the turbulent nurturing of modern societies, Dolphins Into
The Future’s Lieven Martens went to the Azores islands on a quest to
find an arche, an ultimate substance and essence related to all things — and he probably found it in the primordial form of waves: mechanical (acoustic, oceanic), electromagnetic (light, radiation), mathematical (sinusoids, tones). Canto Arquipélago,
like a wave, presented patterns of repetition and interference that
absorbed the environment and reflected it back, in a way that the
artificial (music) was not opposed to the natural (field recordings) but
was embedded within it. Emerging from the gap between these categories,
there were the oscillations of natural cycles confronted to traces of
proto-languages (dolphin whistles, talking percussion, bird chirping,
clusters of analog bubbling), and the bulk movement of wind and rain
added to the arpeggiated and sweeping synths configuring primeval
information networks, dismissing in the process any exoticist
representation. Instead of a trance-like, out-of-body experience with
new-spirituality pretensions, the whole trip was inundated with a
pensive feeling of mundanity — the sublunary becoming all-too-earthly. Canto Arquipélago
did not gaze at the heavens waiting for divine redemption, but
melancholically stared at its terrene surroundings in humble
contemplation. –Carlos Román

Taking its samples and inspirations from music that can often be
found in places such as news channel intros, infomercials, and hotel
lobbies, 札幌コンテンポラリー by 情報デスクVIRTUAL (a.k.a. New Dreams Ltd.,
Macintosh Plus, Laserdisc Visions, etc.) was one of 2012’s most
challenging entries in the already perplexing genre of vaporwave. By
foregrounding corporate sounds in an almost unadulterated format, the
listener was confronted with the deconstruction of kitsch, a removal of
the safe distance that ironic detachment once provided. During its 25
tracks (27 in a subsequent bonus release), 札幌コンテンポラリー demanded
that you stop and listen to the unlistenable, music so ostracized that
it became impossible to not thoroughly reflect on its very structure.
Are we faced with a sonorous exposé of late capitalism, bringing its
invisible sounds to the foreground, forcing us to pay attention to the
never-ending muzak that make up the soundtrack of our consumerist lives?
However you may choose to answer this question, 札幌コンテンポラリー
was the perfect soundtrack to a certain Don Delillo quote: “He watched
Broadway float into the curved window and felt as if blocks of time and
space had come loose and drifted. The misplaced heartland hotel. The
signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory — words that were part of
some synthetic mass language, the Esperanto of jet lag.” –Paulo Scarpa

You can’t entirely prepare for a collaborative improvisation. Sure, you can make patches or conceive of a tonal pool you might
end up using during the session, and you can nail down some certainties
by only bringing specific instruments. But the operative element of any
good improvisation is what shined through on Instrumental Tourist:
it unleashed Tim Hecker’s and Daniel Lopatin’s creativity from the
restraints of their usually dense compositional process, leaving only
the tethers of instinct and taste to decide where their work went. This
freedom led to the intense, freewheeling bursts of energy found in
Hecker’s massive collisions of musical data, as well as a calm wander
through the nuances of texture heard in Lopatin’s deep pads and
delay-laden samples. Instrumental Tourist epitomized the process
of investigating the moment and imbuing it with sound according to the
audition of the preceding moment, serving as a document of the free-play
meeting of great musical minds. It was a game of Go, a conversation of
musical impetus. For all the freedom and uncertainty on Instrumental Tourist, it achieved a remarkable coherence, rivaling even the most exhaustively composed works of 2012. –Matthew Phillips

Dear White Suns, I’m desperate and I need your help. See, the
[HARDCORE] I was leasing just to get to work every day just broke down. I
just can’t afford to get it fixed. But I also really can’t afford
to miss work right now, because the aging [PUNK ROCK] that I take care
of is really sick and can’t get its medication. I am supposed to be a
provider. The thought of it just makes me sick. Also, the [HEAVY METAL] I
was planning on using for retirement was lost in the recent
super-storm. It’s all gone! Just like that. Just a smoking pile of
rubble and ashes! I don’t mean to complain or anything, but is this
what faith and hope in [CLASSIC ROCK] are worth!? And that’s not even
the worst of it. See, my first-born [DRONE] just got drafted in an
unwinnable war that, in one way or another, I just know will end
up claiming his life. Everything just seems broken. It’s all coming
apart. I don’t hear music anymore, just a terrible, inevitable sound.
What kind of [NOISE] is this, White Suns? So fucking ceaseless. So
fucking mangled. So fucking loud. –Nobodaddy

A definite minority of humans personally identify with the Rastafari
movement, but that didn’t prevent anyone from basking in the psychedelic
and rhythmic synergy emanating from Icon Give Thank, the superb
collaboration between the dub-inspired Sun Araw, producer M. Geddes
Gengras, and legendary reggae outfit The Congos. Do you have a distinct
idea of what constitutes the “court of the king”? Does the name Haile
Selassie hold a special significance for you? It’s almost irrelevant,
because similar philosophies (musical and otherwise) brought all of the
individuals involved in this recording together for an album, crafted
primarily in St. Catherine, Jamaica, which appealed across generations
and regardless of whether or not your image of Zion comes mostly from The Matrix.
Sun Araw’s modern take on dub music offered a fresh complement to The
Congos’ delayed and nostalgia-inducing vocals, and this was particularly
evident on “Happy Song,” where the driving bass line, a common quality
of the former’s solo work, presented an amazing contrast with Cedric
Myton’s memorable falsetto. A line in the song also works as an accurate
commentary on the entire album: “Let us play the music. Let us sing the
song. Let us dance and play. Music all night long.” I think we can all
get behind that. –Mike Reid

In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a character dreams of
addiction personified as Death with a big, yellow “Have a Nice Day”
smiley face. That image stuck with me as vaporwave developed throughout
2012; the music was chintzy to the point of surrealism, but with an
unsettling subliminal darkness. Sidestepping that, Mediafired’s gorgeous
album felt optimistic in its hypnotic eccojams. “Pixies,” the
centerpiece to The Pathway Through Whatever’s hyperreality,
turned Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” into the most blissful broken
record I’ve ever heard. Surrounding that, Mediafired passionately worked
from the hazy, looping blueprint of Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person
project, creating glitzy vignettes from warping The Who to the closing
pair of fractured takes on The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,”
which first bloomed into the pulsing “Spring Is Here” and then stretched
and melted like a lava lamp into a pitch-shifted choir on “Tender Age.”
Lopatin first described the looped vocal fragments of eccojams as
something spiritual and poetic to him, but he also hoped the practice
could become more sophisticated. On that merit and more, The Pathway Through Whatever succeeded and became one of the most blissful mindfucks of the year. –Miles Bowe

Technically released last year but too late in the year to make our 2011 list, Amateur Doubles
was a testament to the versatility of listener interpretation. As
suggested by the album’s liner notes (“Recorded 2010-2011 in a Honda
Civic”) and gatefold (a sun-kissed photo of Graham Lambkin sitting in
said vehicle with his family, his veiled gaze directed towards an
obscured car stereo, two CD cases lying on the dashboard), the album was
ostensibly recorded on the road. But regardless of whether it was read
as a meticulously deliberate fabrication or as an authentic artifact,
the recording’s seemingly indeterminate happenings remained an alluring
evocation of automotive experience. Driven by Lambkin’s erratic audition
of two otherworldly Pôle Records albums, the Civic’s womblike acoustics
were supplemented by ambience of both interior and exterior genesis.
Scattered throughout the cut-up tape, we heard the car’s ignition, its
doors opening and closing, muffled speech and soothing whir,
Doppler-effected horns and objects whizzing by. To listen to Amateur Doubles
was to listen to the listening of music: the record blurred the line
between recorded and not-yet-recorded sound, between Lambkin’s status as
esoteric DJ and as field recorder, but in the process it cemented his
reputation as sound poet. –Adrian Rew

In a recent radio interview, Angel Olsen described the process of
finding her voice as similar to how an actress, without ever seeing her
own face, learns to control her expressions in order to convey what a
given scene asks of her. Listening to Half Way Home, Olsen’s
understatedly acrobatic voice nimbly elevated her collection of simple
folks songs to a place that, when encountered, sent a shiver down your
spine. Her delicate falsetto morphed into a caterwaul as easy as it
receded into a whisper. Without a lot of modern vocal peers, it made
sense to compare Olsen’s performance on the record to that of a great
actress who both embodied a role and defined it as a part that only she
could play. Even if you didn’t speak a word of English, Olsen’s voice
would still convey the meaning behind her ambitiously sparse material,
at once stoic and vulnerable, light and heavy. –Ryan A. Detwiler

No one explored the possibilities of disembodied sound this year better than Demdike Stare. Across Elemental’s
nearly two hours of expertly stitched-together dub techno — for lack of
a more apt genre tag — samples were taken out of context, rendered
unidentifiable individually, but given a coherent, recognizable identity
through collaboration. Like 2011’s superlative Tryptych, Elemental thrived on its powerful mood-induction. But while last year’s mammoth collection dealt in deeply claustrophobic atmospheres, Elemental’s
sounds occupied less confining environments. Given greater space to
breathe, those sounds gained the power to question the forces at work
behind their nigh-cinematic evocations. These tracks were palpably
nightmarish, provoking subconscious physical reactions and campily
demanding at least a little bit of rudimentary psychoanalysis: Just why
was this stuff so powerfully associative? And then the questions kept
coming: Why did the drumming in “Erosion of Mediocrity” do “apocalyptic”
better than anybody else, in a year where apocalyptic was
simultaneously ubiquitous and easy? Why did the title of “We Have
Already Died” give the track’s paradoxically organic-sounding techno
groove such a funny and unsettling edge? But most importantly: When
could we hear more? –Conrad Tao

Former Wolf Eyes member Aaron Dilloway spent years on his magnum opus, Modern Jester,
a painstaking project that produced some of the most intricate and
musically aesthetic noise to ever be pressed onto vinyl. And not unlike
his peers John Wiese and C. Spencer Yeh, Dilloway comfortably explored
the sonic dynamic ranges of gritty drones and oscillating static swells
set beyond the noise traditionalism of unwavering harshness. Modern Jester
then played a significant role in returning a once experimental genre
back toward its exploratory roots, defying our expectations of what it
is that noise does, can do, and, of course, will destructively undo. –Jared Micah

20. Kendrick Lamargood kid, m.A.A.d city
[Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope]
Despite exemplifying François Truffaut’s oft-cited claim that “it is
impossible to make a true anti-war film, because the act of looking at
violence is inherently exciting,” Kendrick Lamar’s “short film”
succeeded at having it both ways, as a thrillingly visceral, yet
explicitly critical depiction of a conflict that has claimed the lives
of countless young men. Received as an instant classic, good kid, m.A.A.d city
has revealed itself to be more flawed — and more rewarding — than even
the rapturous critical response would have had you believe. Even if good kid, m.A.A.d city
never fully transcended the Afro-American Gothicisms of its boilerplate
gang-initiation storyline, Lamar experimented with form more daringly
than any other rapper to date, a claim that even his detractors, few and far between,
would have trouble disputing. There are few longform narratives in pop
music and fewer still that are this thoughtful, cohesive, or
self-consciously cinematic. Despite its fractured timelines and
mythopoetic aspirations, it would be a stretch to describe good kid, m.A.A.d city
as avant-garde; nevertheless, this was unmistakably the work of an
artist leading the charge, at the forefront of a still-undefined new
wave. –Embling

“Footworkin on Air,” the opening track of this Planet Mu debut by
Traxman, was one of footwork’s finest moments of the year. Instead of
strapping a chopped vocal stutter into the pilot’s seat, Traxman
commanded an echoey marimba melody to navigate the jagged snare snaps
and jerky claps. It felt like, well, footworkin on air — like floating,
lingering, wandering, drifting. The footwork sound ordinarily thrives on
claustrophobic blasts and grinding repetition. But Traxman spread his
wings and momentarily soared away from the battle floors that serve as
the music’s natural habitat. This was a fascinating gesture considering
that, due to Lit City Trax and Planet Mu’s numerous juke and footwork
releases (Spinn, Rashad, Young Smoke, et al.), this once hyper-local
Chicago dance music managed to smack many new ears this year — ears that
belong to bodies with feet that were “on air,” not down on the dance
floor. This same curious infinity-feeling snuck, ever so slightly, into
head-nodders like “Chillllll” and “Lady Dro,” but Traxman mostly did
what he does best: design dizzying mazes of ever-tangling sounds that
maximized tension without offering breathing room, let alone the
possibility of escape. –Elliott Sharp

Last year, our fourth favorite album of the year was The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss, a work that was best understood through the suspect deployment of nostalgia in 2011 films like The Artist and Hugo.
Here in 2012, The Caretaker wowed us again. But while the album
soundtracked Grant Gee’s documentary of the same name, the music this
time also had to be approached through literature. An astute reader will
understand immediately: we find W.G. Sebald, one of the most incisive
and tragic writers of recent times, directly in the album’s title. At
the start of this millennium, Sebald promised literary vision and
deliverance; before the end of 2001, he was dead. Likewise, The
Caretaker’s tracks, regardless of promised melody, seemed inevitably to
drift away, to be lost at sea. Sebald was famous for embedding pictures
into his prose, often antique found photos, already faded, holey,
beautiful, tortuous for lack of clarity — not unlike the music of Patience.
No single medium was sufficient in these endeavors, as all bowed to the
greater work of Human Memory. In 2012, The Caretaker mined moments from
the past and exposed them to the development of the present, without
breaking a resolute stare toward the future. –Alexander Slotnick

“Daughn Gibson” sounds like only a slightly down-pitched version of
“Don Gibson,” the name of one of Nashville’s saddest poets. And yet,
with such minor tweaks, Daughn Gibson (real name Josh Martin) seems to
have resurrected all the great grim ghosts of country’s past. All Hell,
his debut, didn’t merely set country music storytelling to wobbly
synths and digital loops. Rather, it exploited the emotional
possibilities of digital sound production to create a remarkably
contemporary kind of pain. The redneck emptiness of “Bad Guys” existed
not in spite of, but through its half-false processing of Gibson’s
clichéd baritone; the outlaw desperation of “In the Beginning” came
across not just in the song’s pleading lyrics, but in its crowded mix of
scratchy samples, as they each incessantly returned to some long lost
time before sin. Gibson had the good sense to keep his arrangements as
light as the morning air, and yet it was precisely the incredible
weightlessness of these songs that made each so crushingly tragic. In
fact, All Hell simply did what all good country does: it turned
the time of decay and space of ruination into pleasing sonic form.
Sadness, grief, loss, betrayal — the circle is indeed broken, but the
emotions it once contained here became sources of exquisite pleasure and
established nothing less than a future for country. –Ed Comentale

Try to pigeonhole Death Grips. Just try. Experimental. Industrial.
Hip-hop. Rap. Punk rap. Garage rap. Noise rap. Avant-noise. Post-noise.
Electrical noise. Listen to “Double Helix.” MC Ride shouts about an “unidentified genre abductor,” and maybe that’s the best way to describe Death Grips. Furtive. Violent. The Money Store warped and wrecked sounds we knew or sounds we thought we knew. The Money Store
crackled and rumbled from an unrecognizable future world, a wasteland
where only shattered screens and burnt wires and exploded buildings
remain. MC Ride, Zach Hill, and Andy Morin channeled an underworld from
the end of the world to warn us, to shock us into remembering that no
one is ever safe. “Lost Boys” trapped a disembodied voice in a
burned-out power plant. “The Cage” distorted and broke down beats that
sounded like alarms. “Hacker” invaded a crowd. The Money Store
conjured a dark and deconstructed space where no one speaks and no one
sleeps, a space mapped only by disregard and danger. And yet, we’ve
returned again and again. We’ve returned for the thrill. –Caroline Rayner

It’s easy to label DJ Rashad’s TEKLIFE Vol. 1 as footwork’s
crowning achievement. After several years of hype and more than a few
exceptional releases, 2012 saw the genre expand with the epic, 83-minute
TEKLIFE released by his own Lit City Trax (with DJ Spinn and J-Cush), entering the mainstream media’s consciousness
and subsequently representing the whole Chicago-based dance movement
for most curious listeners. Unsurprisingly, Rashad lined his record with
the enduring footwork trademarks: highly syncopated, often disorienting
rhythms and chopped samples falling somewhere between bizarre minimal
rap and kush-fueled experimentation. But let’s get real: TEKLIFE
was its own hybrid animal, an album that reflected Rashad’s rapidly
evolving musical intuition and an international flavor influenced by his
globetrotting. The record could be weird as hell, brimming with ideas,
sprawlingly uneven, and all the better for it. You either connected with
it or you didn’t, its bare-bones production being either amateurish or a
welcomed catharsis from overcrowded house and calculated, entitled indie. Appropriate for footwork’s ambassador, the tracks on TEKLIFE
were constantly in motion, containing an almost improvisational spirit
and looseness amidst an unrelenting pulse. As far as I’m concerned, the
mid-album span from “Fly Spray” to “Over Ya Head” was its own
masterstroke within a masterstroke, a 40-some minute stretch of
absurdist new-electronic minimalism that once again raised the bar. By
the time “We Leanin” locked into its pitch-shifting, hilarious,
mindblowing four-minute mantra of “I’m geeked up off them bars, nigga,” there was no turning back. –Keith Kawaii

Another faux-trendy, post-ironic, undanceable dance release with lots
of caps lock and hashtags? Nice, TMT. Real nice. No question we
listened to plenty of “that” this year — not that our brains were too
warped to interlock upon any consensus — but James Ferraro’s mixtape as
BEBETUNE$ was an uncommonly singular entry, one that managed to
encapsulate so many of 2012’s ever-morphing musical values without at
any point allowing itself be mistaken for a thing cold, conceptual,
anthropological, or rote. Sure, its social critiques (witness the mutant
gurgle and PCE-evoking
title of “Pepsi Baby”) were readily apparent. And the flotsam — the
hypercompressed escalations building to nothing at all, the most
indulgent Auto-Tune discharges this side of Farrah Abraham — might on
first listen have sounded like baldfaced hit-or-miss references. But
this was not a listening experience of strung-out addiction and malaise:
some uncanny, aberrant harmony repeatedly beckoned us back. Ferraro’s
became an accelerationism fearless and deceptively serene. Between the
insanely cheesy synth that provided the lone ray of clarity in “#C I T Y
LIGHT$$$” and what may be a literal storefront congregation in
“P.O.W.E.R.,” Ferraro’s project was secretly about locating a kernel of
belief at the core of all things cultural, messy, and anxious. Forget
“distroid” — by far the most unnerving thing about inhale c-4 $$$$$ was the warm, beating heart at the center of each song. –unicornmang

Suspense was one of the central components that made Holly Herndon’s Movement
such an irresistible listen. Patterns emerged through purported rhythms
that stretched across a drastic range of formats, respiration being the
most prominent. Ex/inhalation, contraction, expiry, and whisper become
visualized as a consequence of observing compositional frameworks, where
specific sounds were subconsciously imposed by association upon
familiar, tangible motions — when Herndon breathed in, it was
understandably expected that exhalation would follow. The element of
tension was achieved through tampering with the setup of each
anticipated response in creating something wholly unimaginable. Gingerly
austere, delicately abraded, strung up, and wrapped in plastic, these
patterns didn’t solely extend the breadth of the rhythmic experimental
tracks exhibited here; they also encompassed those disco moments so
lovingly hailed by critics as an open doorway to the “academic sound art
tangled in Berlin nightclub appreciation” model that Herndon adopted.
Regardless of the form these splendid compositions took — a 4/4 beat
fumbling into pitch-shifted purr, a palpitating baritone loop bleeding
into crumpled distortion, a stupefied retention that danced like analog
static — suspense was always on the cusp, looming at the seams of the
most gorgeously pranayamic album of 2012. –Birkut

12. Frank Oceanchannel ORANGE
[Def Jam]
The de facto chaperone of a brilliant though foul-mouthed collective
of young L.A. rappers, Frank Ocean had a few pop songwriting credits and
a mixtape to his name when Kanye made him the first voice you hear on
his and Jay-Z’s occasionally exceptional index of hubris, Watch the Throne.
Stack on that the difficulty of coming out just before releasing an
eagerly anticipated album in a genre where homophobia still finds plenty
of purchase. And yet all this pales: “Thinkin Bout You,” ORANGE’s
astonishing opener and single, introduced Ocean as a voice both pained
and limitless, falsetto employed with abandon, as haunted and oversexed
as anything from Prince or D’Angelo. Across the album’s 62 minutes,
Ocean veered from heartbroken to pathetic (“Pyramids”) to eminently
chill (“Sweet Life”) to something like lucky (“Super Rich Kids”). As he
channel-surfed and catalogued the varieties of Californian experience,
Ocean revealed himself to be an artful collaborator, a talented and
well-read musician, and an innovative songwriter. channel ORANGE,
defying its hype, revealed a young man at his most confessional,
confused, and aching, already primed for an altogether new type of
throne. –Daniel Sargeant

Let them be, they can’t shut up. Nor should they. You should calm
down. No need to be angry. We can be far more than this… No, we have
been. Even when we were excessive. Even when we sounded childish. People
just try to bring us down because they need to. They need to forget
that they, they themselves, are just as flawed and messed up. They just
want us to fuck up so we feel better about themselves. Well, let them
think that, whatever. We still have ourselves, right? And that certainly
helps. You could be a better friend […] I could be a better man.
You put a line, let it drag out, punched a beat that makes the whole
damn thing danceable. You let your voice waver, quiver, but never get
gimmicky. You kept yourself at a constant. You had help from others, but
you were great by yourself. Being myself makes me feel like I know who you are.
You kept yourself distant yet close, and that’s important. You’re
always there, even when you don’t reveal yourself. And yet, you didn’t
think of yourself as any better than anyone else: I know you’re faced with something/ That could consume you completely. It makes you very powerful. And you remember: It’s always different. They may not like you, but they can’t touch you. –Ze Pequeno

“I can’t talk to you,” snarled the deeply frustrated, highly repugnant male subject of Dean Blunt’s The Narcissist II,
before smacking his lover and tumbling into a mental morass of wheezing
drone, wireless interference, and YouTube-compressed storm clouds. Upon
reemerging, he found a troubling means of expression: self-reflexive
“come hither” song sketches glued together by R&B cliché, but too
ragged and paranoid to settle into any genre in particular. Here,
songcraft congealed from artful escape into pathological avoidance,
recentering the drama by way of co-opted language and mood, a comforting
cloud of smoke blown at the bathroom mirror. But as the outside world
intrudes — with violent narrative interjections, ringtone keyboard
lines, the scraping whirr of a crusty apartment — that projected image
warped and stretched to let through slivers of actual alienation.
Blunt’s uncomfortable vocal delivery upped the tension, slipping from
playful to sinister to desperate, hilariously confused but disturbing in
context. On the sublime title track, at the singer’s lowest moment, he
hurled out a strange request to “fold” her, some despairing
desire trapped between fucking and holding, a smeared impulse left
unresolved as the song washed away in a wave of canned critical
applause. One of many bent transmissions from Hype Williams HQ in 2012, The Narcissist II may have been their most unusual and affecting infiltration yet. –Squeo

TIMETIMETIME&TIME was initially shocking for how
painstakingly meticulous it was and how current and unabashedly hip its
referents and sources were, embracing footwork’s skittering percussion,
clipped vocal ghosts, and chopped-up twangs of acoustic guitar rather
than the corporate pap of Beer On The Rug’s more well-known vaporwave
releases this year. It was built on dance music’s core of repetition,
yes, and wore its edits on its sleeve, but it joyfully avoided dance’s
forward momentum — a gorgeous and purposeful surface at all times, but
no cohesive trajectory, endlessly discursive and elusive. Its rhythmic
underpinnings clattered in and out of formation as it followed
inscrutable whims on odd tangents, memories of older loops appearing,
transfiguring, disappearing, returning again in some mangled form.
Certainly the least aggravating and most purely pleasurable of the
label’s releases, YYU nevertheless seemed to invoke the same sort of
intellectual fascination as vaporwave’s aggressively wretched material.
It seemed to exist for some purpose or statement, but it even more so
than the rest of the label’s work, figuring out what that might be
proved close to impossible. After YYU, the loop and the edit were no
longer firm and solid, but they proved just as transfixing. –Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

One of the most enduring kinds of music offers total immersion, an
aesthetic world unto itself. An intangible place or headspace in which
to while away some time, from which to return in some way enriched. Andy
Stott’s Luxury Problems can lay full claim to this rare
achievement: from the orbital vocal loops of “Numb” down to “Up the
Box’s” mossy, terrestrial rhythms, the album was like an experimental
techno circumbinary of Music For Airports, On Land, and all manner of
interstellar debris in between. An evocatively textured and visually
descriptive work, Luxury Problems was the most fully-formed
microcosm presented by any one artist in 2012. Yet for all its
atmospheric layers and tactile intricacies, it remained an unusually
intimate listen. As if to center his most ambitious dub techno and
“knackered house” abstractions to date, Stott’s widely noted use of his
teenage piano teacher’s voice provided an emotional core half-hidden by
both its title and its sonic palette. Allison Skidmore’s repurposed old a
capellas served as warehouse operatics, textually ambiguous and
obscured by echo, but nevertheless imbued with the deeply personal
resonance of an artist returning to the woman with whom he began his
musical studies, nearly 20 years later, to ask once more for guidance;
to show her everything he’s learned. –Jakob Dorof

Much of the year’s best electronic music could be described as
indeterminate, open-ended technoid soundscapes increasingly preoccupied
with vertical elaboration over sequential composition. The possibilities
opened up by Selected Ambient Works Vol. II and Burial have
crystallized into an established lexicon for the post-bass underground,
and no one pushed this aesthetic logic further than Actress. R.I.P
dramatized the journey of the soul through the underworld with a series
of baroque abstractions, piecing together a dark brocade of richly
textured materials, an elaborate drapery profuse with a labyrinthine
complex of shadowy folds. No other electronic artist this year was as
fixated on the encounter between clarity and obfuscation, smoothness and
erosion, the explicit and the implicit, and no other artist displayed
as much talent and poise in bringing the drama of that encounter to
life. –Jonathan Dean

For many of us here at TMT, 2012 was all about vaporwave.
And in many ways, New Dreams Ltd., the umbrella moniker for Macintosh
Plus, 情報デスクVIRTUAL, Laserdisc Visions, and Sacred Tapestry, embodied the
genre best. Not only did it provide some of vaporwave’s most essential releases, but it also cannily folded at just the right moment, thanking us all for visiting the Virtual Casino. 2012 wasn’t just the year vaporwave broke; it was also the year it exhausted itself: morphed, rebranded, its practitioners moved on. If any single release deserves to be remembered, though, it is surely Floral Shoppe. From the very beginning, it stood out
not only for its artful marrying of the conceptual with the sensual,
but also for its performance of the inseparability between the two.
Working with a particularly wide range of readymades, from R&B
classics through glossy muzak to smooth jazz grooves, Floral Shoppe slid seamlessly between pure pop pleasure and the ironic framing
of that pleasure, the presence of the artist at turns barely noticeable
and dramatically foregrounded. This is the sound of a kind of sensuous
virtuality, the artist as simulacra, both the experience and problematization of the post-human, a new cyber-pop unconscious. –James Parker

There’s an unlikely precedent for what Laurel Halo did on Quarantine: Neil Young’s Trans.
The vocal abstractions Young created circa 1982 for one of his most
critically maligned works was an attempt to connect with his young son
who had cerebral palsy and was unable to speak. His use of vocoder
allowed him a chance to make a human connection through electronic
enhancement. Halo asserted in various interviews that, by removing the
reverb from her vocal tracks, the objective was to add some humanity
into her works of techno wonder. Instead, she managed to offend a lot of
fans or would-be fans the same way that Young did. The amount of bile
spewed forth via internet commentators over Quarantine’s vocals
was staggering. The same amount of hatred is still piled onto Young’s
album, but both works are bright, bold, and beautiful, sounding as if
they were beamed in from a “post-human” future. Some people were not
quite ready for Quarantine. A lot of us were. –Joe Davenport

Mount Eerie’s two releases this year were tethered tightly, but asymmetrically. Clear Moon’s
emotionally-satisfying songs flowed into one another as naturally as
lunar phases, weaving together a career’s worth of Phil Elverum’s
previous strains of sound (Wind’s Poem’s black metal, Lost Wisdom’s spare folk, and even The Glow Pt. 2’s
indefinably catchy layers) with some new ones (vocoders, drum machines,
synths) to create his most precise and, well, clear statement yet. The
nearly instrumental Ocean Roar took those same elements and
seemed to make fragmentation instead of coherence, lopsidedness instead
of balance, sound instead of a statement. Released first, Clear Moon’s structured gravity seemed to shape the unpredictable swells of Ocean’s tides. But eventually, I caught glimpses of Moon’s reflection in Ocean Roar’s
uneven surface, too. It makes sense that Mount Eerie would happen to
record its most and least coherent albums at the same time: “There is either no end/ Or constant simultaneous end and beginning,” Phil Elverum sings on Clear Moon’s
“Through the Trees pt. 2.” It’s not that Elverum has so successfully
reinvented himself twice this year; it’s that, again, he’s never had to.
–Benjamin Pearson

A bizarre paradox of the human condition: there is no experience of
profound joy or pleasure that is not accompanied by pain. It’s
unsurprising that Christian mystics frame religious ecstasy in violent
terms, the flaming darts of St. John of the Cross or the golden spear of
St. Teresa of Avila. It’s a joy that pierces, a joy that penetrates, a
joy that overwhelms with its just-too-much-ness. Michael Gira has always
aimed at capturing this rapturous state via the sheer sonic brutality
of Swans, and in many ways, The Seer can be considered the
culmination of those efforts. In its maddening dins and unnerving
silences; in its thundering hammer blows and tender caresses; in its
twisting, arduous passages that promised a fulfillment no frail human
creature is sturdy enough to withstand, the record carved a rhythm that,
for its near two-hour runtime, had the power to change one’s entire way
of being. Like Gira’s parade of tortured mystics — lunatics, seers,
warriors, apostates — we felt like we had brushed something vast and
powerful, but not necessarily without cost. Swans used their profane
tools to elevate us toward the sacred and showed us a path to ecstasy as
severe as that of any monastic order. –Joe Hemmerling

From the dark, slow burn of Andy Stott and Black Rain to the more
elaborate gloomscapes of Raime and Demdike Stare, black was serious
currency in the international dance underground of 2012. Typical, then,
that perhaps the year’s most convincing celebration of the color came
wrapped in a red sleeve, the cover text referencing African-American
consumer culture rag Ebony (black, amirite?). But if that
undermined blacker-than-thou pretensions elsewhere, the act of
détournement itself sprung from another scene entirely: Dean Blunt and
Inga Copeland started out performing thriftstore improv in small
galleries, and although their Hyperdub deal surprised many, it didn’t
stop them from diversifying their gallery portfolio as career outsiders peddling homebrew psychedelia. For some listeners, the joy of Black Is Beautiful was found in the diversity of its frame of reference — surely only one band can connect the dots between Bruce Haack, Mick Harris, Nami Shimada, and Billy Cobham
while sounding like no one but themselves — yet of all the
contradictions and paradoxes that keep Blunt and Copeland afloat,
perhaps the likeliest is that, all posturing aside, they are not
incompetents. They are just competent enough, flaunting a rare and
bewildering equilibrium forged in the crucible of on-the-fly
collaborative composition. Against all appearances, Black Is Beautiful was a matter of precision. –Reed Scott Reid

01. Scott WalkerBish Bosch
[4AD]
Is it now safe to say that 2012 was a terrible year? Is it now safe
to say that it was another terrible year in a string of terrible years?
God, did you see what I saw? Running together, shuffled into one
consumptive experience, the stories that we have left to tell are
terrible things, indeed. Pink slime, drones, Trayvon Martin, Fifty Shades of Grey,
Benghazi, Lana Del Rey, #Kony2012, Hurricane Sandy, Jerry Sandusky,
McDonald’s’ Flavor Wars, James Holmes, bath salts, and cannibalism.
Unity through “Gangnam Style.” Ecce Homo, mangled. The dark day behind us, the dark day ahead… Was there a better year for a new Scott Walker album?
I admit: a part of me sighed after Mr P assigned me Walker’s Bish Bosch. Had we even had time to digest it? (Yes, Ed did,
obviously.) Most of us are still farting out words left and right,
trying to grant some air of meaning to a work that is bigger, yes,
bigger than we are at this moment in time. I’m not suggesting that Bish Bosch is incomprehensible. What I mean is that Walker is a world-builder, and you don’t so much listen to Bish Bosch as much as you wake up
into its interpretation and wander around. While most of us haven’t had
the time to get to know it well, the first steps have nonetheless been
thrilling, enough to warrant its placement here, at the end, even as we
are only beginning to understand its importance.
From what I can determine, Bish Bosch is important largely
for what it isn’t: more sentimental garbage from another “old master.”
Working from the absolute periphery of what can still be called the
“folk process,” it’s totally at home in tradition, in passing-down, in
relating then to now. Yet, unlike his cohorts, Walker does so without a
waft of nostalgia; no, his stories are cyclones picking the past up into
the sky, dropping bits and pieces as he goes along his way. What’s left
is dumped into the present. Sorted, sort of. Walker is a storyteller at
the end of storytelling, and he “spins his yarns” from a broken radio
play, broadcast from history’s rubble: a remnant of the decaying oral
tradition, howling like the anti-Garrison Keillor at the Cabaret
Voltaire, letting disgusting sounds from bodies and instruments slither
around words and utterances, letting them articulate their meaning when
the words and speakers themselves are losing ground.Bish Bosch is also important for what it actually is: a
reclamation, and transformation, of the meaning of lived history. I
remember reading that Joan Didion, after enduring a week in El Salvador
in 1983 (eh, eunuch Ron?), had made her see Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a
“social realist.” Spend some time in 2012 with Walker, and he too
unfurls the surrealism of the real from the real. For Walker,
history is a springboard for facts to launch off of, so that they might
break apart in the atmosphere until the blunt truth of them remains.
Whether or not they orbit or crash down is completely contingent upon
the nature of the truth. So yeah, Walker’s factually wrong sometimes.
Sure, his stories are fantastical, non-sequential, absurd. But can you
listen to “SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” and tell me that
you’ve never turned into a brown dwarf? I know that nearly every day
this year I woke up on the verge.
More significant than temporary importance, though, is what vitality Bish Bosch
has lying in wait. What will propel Walker’s work forward — what will
keep us listening beyond 2012, or 13, or 14 — is its comedic critique of
the ruthless comedy that its world, our world, coheres to. The
pitifulness of the pitiless. The rot and stench of the body, broken and
broken down. History culminating in the questionnaire. The final,
quasi-threatening words of wisdom: GTFO! That music is made with
anything, everything, especially things that will kill you. That you
make it anyway. That the story is finished slap-dash, and that it will
nonetheless stand in judgement of a time and place that no longer really
believed in judgement at all, but apocalypse. Honestly, I wonder if
we’ll ever live to see the day that we’re actually done with Walker’s
work.
So, maybe we only had a few weeks with Bish Bosch here at TMT,
but for most of us, it only took a short time to discover how it could
be possible that even our worst years (centuries, millennia, whatever)
could be exposed, drained, re-/dis-figured, and
recast/told/sung/farted/assassinated into a towering work of art. Bish
bash bosh. The end. #yolo –Nathan Shaffer

Flatform - Quantum + Trento Symphonia + Movements of an Impossible Time + A Place to Come + Can Not Be Anything Against the Wind + 57.600 Seconds of Invisible Night and Light + Sunday 6th April, 11:42 a.m. + About zero + With Nature There Are no Special Effects, Only Consequences (f)

Ben Rivers - The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (f)

Cheryl Frances-Hoad - Glory Tree (m)

Thomas Adès - The Twenty-Fifth Hour (m)

Daníel Bjarnason - Over Light Earth + Processions + Solaris (m)

Dobrinka Tabakova - String Paths (m)

Jacek Sienkiewicz - Nomatter (m)

Veli-Matti Puumala - Anna Liisa (m)

Bill Douglas - Trilogy: My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home (f)

DIALECT - Gowanus Drifts (m)

Robert Enrico - Au coeur de la vie (f)

Kara-lis Coverdale & LXV - Sirens (m)

Uljana Wolf - i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (b)

Mempo Giardinelli - Sultry Moon (b)

Jean-Marie Straub - Dialogue d'ombres (f)

Klaus Hoffer - Among the Bieresch (b)

Maxim Biller - U glavi Brune Schulza (b)

Svend Åge Madsen - Days with Diam + Virtue & Vice in the Middle Time (b)